Software

When the CD disk that comes with Foxconn Mars mainboard autoruns, you will get a window designed in the same red and black colors and Greco-Roman style as the mainboard packaging:

The disk contains a set of drivers and utilities for the chipset, integrated sound and network cards and RAID controller for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. I am sure that you know the meaning of the “Create RAID Driver Floppy” or “Browse CD”, so we will move on to the most interesting Software section. The board comes with Adobe Reader 7.0.7, Microsoft DirectX 9.0c, Norton Internet Security 2006, and two brand name utilities: LiveUpdate ver. 1.0.5.1 and AEGIS Panel.

Foxconn Mars mainboard has no integrated BIOS reflashing tool, so you can hit the standard Alt+F2 combination to reflash the BIOS from a floppy disk. If there is no FDD drive in your computer, which happens more and more often these days, you can always use FOX LiveUpdate utility for BIOS reflashing from Windows.

The utility is very simple to set up and use. It allows you to same the current BIOS version, reflash the new BIOS from any of the available storage devices or look for updates online. I was very pleased to discover that the utility not only searches for new BIOS versions for your mainboard, but also checks if new software or driver revisions also became available.

However, the most interesting thing is the AEGIS Panel program that is defined as “advanced Windows-based overclocking and system control utility” on the mainboard package. Once launched, it displays a large window with gigantic digits for the current processor frequency, multiplier and FSB speed.

Don’t even try clicking on the “L PANEL” and “R PANEL” buttons: they are even highlighted red. I didn’t get it at first and clicked. Nothing interesting happened: the panels opened on the left and right sides, but they were empty.